Quickly
on the heels of her second trade poetry collection, Magyarázni (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2016) [see my review of such here], comes Calgary poet Helen Hajnoczky’s chapbook, Bloom & Martyr (Kalamalka Press, 2016), a letterpress chapbook in
an edition of fifty copies, produced as a result of the chapbook-length manuscript
of such (a section from a longer work-in-progress of the same name) being
awarded the 2015 John Lent Poetry-Prose Award. The short sequence of poems contained
in this chapbook are constructed out of a delightful staccato of gestures,
sound and syntax, bouncing across and around the condensed lyric. “Grace you
raze me moth and flutter,” she writes, “temperate / and dahlia my joints, your
pressure, roots or / twine you entwine me.” Given this is but an excerpt of a
far longer work, I am very curious about the eventual final, full-length
version. Rich with floral language, in tenor and subject matter, she writes a
passion of and through flowers, allowing the language free reign, propelling
her text in a far different and more overt way than she has in previous works. In her 2015 interview posted at Touch the Donkey, she spoke of the work-in-progress “Bloom & Martyr,” offering
that:

All the poems are in the same style, using a
discussion of flowers and gardens as a way to explore desire from a feminist
perspective. Writing the manuscript was incredibly fun. At the time I had been
tinkering with my then manuscript and now forthcoming book for a while, and I
had become a bit forestalled while editing. Then in August 2014 in Calgary I
had a chance to read with Natalie Simpson whose work I find enthralling, and
she talked about taking an approach to writing where she’d write a lot down in
a notebook, and then type up the lines she wanted to keep. It had been a while since
I’d written something new and I thought, ‘I used to write that way, why don’t I
do that anymore?’ So I went back to Montreal and reread Natalie’s book accrete or crumble which is such a
dense, rich, and inspiring book that after reading it I wrote Bloom and Martyr in a week and a half,
mostly on my phone on the bus to work, on coffee breaks, etc.